Every time a window broke at Silver Line Building Products, it meant more than a job for the janitor. It meant a delayed sale. Often, it meant a lot of delayed sales. That's because glass isn't the only fragile object that Silver Line, one of the country's leading manufacturers of vinyl-frame windows, must deal with. Its customershome improvement centers and the likedon't take well to incomplete orders.

So when one window broke, dozens of perfectly good ones were left on the loading dock until a replacement was made and the order was shipped in full. To make matters worse, the company's antiquated tracking system didn't alert anyone to start manufacturing that new window until it was too late to make the day's delivery runs. That took a toll on efficiencyand profits.

So if Silver Line couldn't design a better way to build windows, it would design a better way to track them. Using real-time analytics and reporting technology, the company now takes the same data it has traditionally collected on the manufacturing line and makes it available in a more timely and useful manner. Instead of managers having to hunt down missing windows when a truck is ready to load, they're alerted to problems hours before loading time. "It's reduced our back orders by 98 percent," says Dan Lyons, vice president of information systems at Silver Line, headquartered in North Brunswick, New Jersey.

On the manufacturing lines, it's business as usual. Whenever one of the 20,000-plus windows Silver Line makes each day is finished, the tracking system scans its label and passes the information to the IBM UniData relational database running on a Unix-based IBM RS6000.

The difference is in how Silver Line uses that data. Under the old system, company expediters would have to check printed reports or call up database screens on their PCs to see if a window had been finished. Now, a message goes out to their BlackBerry wireless devices two hours before loading time, telling them which windows have not been made. "The data chases the person instead of the other way around," says Lyons. "The expediter can then call the manufacturing line and tell the people there to push that window through so we can get it on the truck in time."

What makes the improved monitoring possible is Iteration Real-Time Suite, the new software Silver Line has added to the mix. A Web services interface links the existing RS6000 box to Iteration's Web services receiver and passes along each transaction as the RS6000 picks it up. That gives the Iteration system the necessary information for monitoring the manufacturing process. By processing this message stream according to rules developed by Silver Line, the systemwhich runs on a Dell/Intel system running Windows 2000 Server on 4 CPUs with 4GB of memorycan spring into action in real time. It sends out alerts, for example, when a window that needs to be shipped hasn't yet rolled off the assembly line.

Once the system was up and running, some tweaks were needed. Silver Line has settled on an alert system built around "hot orders," critical jobs that absolutely have to go out on the next truck. If the Iteration system recognizes that a truck has been closed without the hot order aboard, it sends instant messages telling shipping and sales staff to hold the truck.

The new system is already running in three of Silver Line's seven factories across the country, with the other four online shortly. The next step, says Lyons, is to get the real-time system to the company's truck drivers. By carrying BlackBerry devices integrated with Iteration's software, the drivers could immediately send replacement orders to the plant if windows break in transit. "It means that we don't have to wait for the driver to get back and file the paperwork, which can take up to four days on some of our runs," says Lyons.

The system will expedite invoicing too if drivers record successful deliveries as they occur, triggering the billing process back at Silver Line's headquarters. "If a driver tells us he delivered nine of ten windows and the other one broke, we can bill for the nine and make a replacement for the tenth," says Lyons. "And we can do it right away." If all goes as planned, the only thing broken windows will be a drain on is patience.

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